Recap: PLAAY Games at Dice Tower West 2024
"And--we're back!" (As Johnny Carson used to say, Doc Severinsen bringing the Tonight Show band to a screeching halt--(ah, the good old days of late night TV!)…
Great time in Vegas, as usual. Many thanks to Tom Vasel and his Dice Tower team, I can only imagine the enormous amount of planning that goes into this event. I mean, I sometimes feel overwhelmed making plans for OUR little convention--of 60-70 people! (Dice Tower West has about 3,000).
Anyway, I already hit the high points of the first couple days at Dice Tower in my "mid-con" blog post, but I managed to forget a few things, so let me get caught up with those and then give you an overview of the rest of the convention...
Thurdsay 03.07.24
Thursday morning, PLAAY gamer Scott Johnson stopped by the booth, and we got our Roller Rumble to play our "Bob Jinkerson Memorial Roller Derby Game." Many of you will remember Bob from the Delphi forum, a wonderful guy, gone too soon. He loved roller derby, and me and Scott played a game in his honor at PLAAY-Dot-CON. We decided to remember Bob again at Dice Tower, Scott took the New York Vagabonds (the league's HEEL team!), I went with the Philadelphia Thunderbolts.
A classic New York/Philadelphia match-up! Unfortunately, the Bolts were time and again victimized by the Vagabonds BAD behavior, and fell behind 22-2 by the third period. In the fourth period, though, a potential turning point: New York got complacent, and started grandstanding and showboating to their home crowd ("ignore all qualities, rest of period"). Philly quickly took advantage with a five-point jam that made it 22-7, and things were looking hopeful. Alas, two more Philly jam chances were squashed by untimely penalties and a third was called off by the referee. Golden opportunity, lost. Final score: New York 44, Philadelphia 24.
Thursday night was our second annual Dice Tower West Golf Tournament with History Maker Golf, I already recapped the highlights in my Saturday blog post. It was great fun, we played as "caddies” for this event, everyone chose a favorite golfer from the “All-Time Greats” collection. We had two threesomes: Paul Crane (Jack Nicklaus), Samantha Goldstein (Phil Mickelson) and Caleb Wilson (Arnold Palmer) were the first threesome; Scott Johnson (Payne Stewart), David Siskin (Hale Irwin) and Steve Carey (Ben Crenshaw) were the second. Our plan was to have the winner of each threesome go to a sudden-death playoff to determine who would win a copy of the game. Well, Steve already had the game (and, frankly, had earned enough golfing glory with his scorching eight under-par 64!), so we dispensed with the playoff and awarded the game to Paul, who had shot a respectable four under-par 68 to win his table honors.
Friday 03.08.24
Friday, one of the highlights was meeting PLAAY gamer Jason Aldrich and his wife Danica. Jason mentioned he was interested in the bowling game, so I made a deal with him: we'd roll a game of Bowl-O-Rama, "participation mode" (i.e., physically rolling the twenty-sided die down the PLAAY mat bowling alley!), both of us using the 190 average card. If he beat me, I would basically GIVE him the game. (I made this offer after having told him about our Bowl-O-Rama tournament at the 2021 PLAAY-Dot-CON, which I won by almost 30 pins over the runner-up! Overconfident maybe? Uh...yeah. I did beat the average by rolling a 219, but Jason racked up strike after strike, wound up with a 252!!
Later, Jason and Danica stopped back by the booth for a game of Draft Duel! I had tossed a copy in the demo game box at the last minute. We had a great game. It looked like Danica was going to pull it out with a flurry of field goals from Cincinnati’s McPherson on the Monday Night game. It was up to me to make up the difference in my post-game press conference (Jason and Danica did not earn one). I got a touchdown, an onsides kick, a second touchdown AND pulled off the three-point conversion to win by ONE point! Oh yeah.
Friday morning, Jule Sigall met me at the booth to put Soccer Blast Express through a final run-through before we introduce it at this year's convention. We used the new 2023 MLS cards for play-test purposes. Good stuff! Among the games played was a match featuring "my" Rapids against "his" Sounders (Jule is from the Seattle area), resulting in 3-0 thrashing by Seattle (predictable).
Friday afternoon I hosted an event with "Aviatrix '37," offering Dice Tower West gamers a chance to fly cooperatively and--if we made it around the world in 30 days or less--everyone would get a free copy of the game. I limited this to three gamers and myself--(there's only so much room in the cockpit of a Lockheed Elektra, heh heh!) One gamer showed up early and decided the game wasn't for him, another had conflicting game events and couldn't make it at flight time. That left me and Chris Collumb to climb in and take off. Works for me, there was just Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan in the REAL plane…
I let Chris do the decision-making, offering suggestions as needed. He was doing really well, almost halfway around the world by day 10! Then, well...we stopped for fuel in Fortaleza, Brazil. We were due for a night's rest. But Chris made the decision to skip sleep and keep flying. Shortly after take-off, he fell asleep at the controls. (Bad news...)
Friday night was our dodgeball tournament, which was recapped in my earlier blog post. Here’s a photo of the group, just before the championship game went down. From left: Phillip Jeon, Caleb Wilson, Manuel Barela, John Mallory, Aaron Wellerin, Chris Collumb (yes, Aviator ‘37 Chris!).
Saturday 03.09.24
Saturday, I tried out a new head-to-head variant of Fury Hardball I've been working on with Jule and Blake Wilson. I wanted to add a little more "game" and a little less "sim" to it, when playing head-to-head. Specifically, the game is set up so that the abilities of the players on the field impact about half of the results. This is what the sim folks want, to be able to remove yourself from the game and watch the players do their thing. From a game standpoint, though, it's not quite optimal. It presents situations where you've correctly deduced what your opponent is going to do but get no benefit from having done so (if you roll a "sim" result). In this new variant, I've distilled the batting/pitching interface down to a set of 30 pitch cards. Each card has results for each of the three possible batting stances and a "look/not" reading for baserunners. You shuffle the pitch deck and draw four cards for your hand--four possible pitching options for the next batter. Choose one, place it face down. Batter announces his swing. Read the result from the card. Sometimes you'll roll from the slinger or batter or fielder card--but this could be a good/bad thing, depending on the game situation.
Long story short, I thought it worked really well. Jule offered some interesting thoughts on using the pitch deck in solitaire play. My sense is that, for solitaire play, Fury Hardball's standard rules work fabulously. The deck COULD be used in solo mode, but I'm not sure it would be an upgrade from the standard mode. Anyway, we will play this at the Wisconsin event, end of April. We're talking about either a draft league using the "Managers and Mercenaries" cards, which would have to be limited to eight managers, or a stock team tournament that could be open to as many as would like to play.
Most of Saturday—indeed, most of our four days at DTW—Sam was busy showing people how to play “Myth Mash,” our new “Trick-Taking, Deck-Building Card Battler” card game. To say that it was well-received would be an understatement. Virtually every person who played the game with Sam picked up a copy of the game for themselves. As I said in my ealier blog post, we will do a YouTube stream to show this game in the PLAAY Space sometime in the near future. Here’s Sam with DTW-goer Mark Ernst…
Saturday night was our "official" Dice Tower West Hoops event. We ended up using Jule's college tournament teams, which will be available next week for free download. In my earlier Dice Tower post, I talked about the good place that we think the game is in right now. In all, we played six games during a three-day span, Thursday through Saturday, here are the results...
Michigan State 64, Boise State 50
UCONN 78, Fairfield 53
Grand Canyon University 82, Kentucky 77
Marquette 73, Kansas62
Villanova 80, San Diego State 77
Washington State 75, Colorado 73
I thought about posting a run-down of the stats, stat lines from every game, but I'm running out of time to get this posted. Suffice it to say, all stat categories were within tolerance. However, we all agreed that what really stands out about the game is the narrative. We saw players who played an integral part in their team's performance, but you couldn't necessarily see it in the stat line. "Good" fouls, "dagger" threes, freshman miscues, and so on. So cool. We'll speak more about the game soon, stay tuned. Only after the fact did we realize that nobody had taken pictures of the hoops action—DOH! Here’s the core group of hoops guys, picture taken after the GOLF tournament. (standing) Scott Johnson, Jule Sigall, Keith Avallone, Mike Fitzgerald; (seated) Steve Carey, David Siskin…
Other Dice Tower rememberances...
• During the (rare!) down time at the booth, I got out the business card games we handed out at our first visit to Dice Tower, in 2022. Mowmaster, Pachinko, Rugby 6 and Forest Friends. I have said on a number of occasions that I think MowMaster is a great game for our crowd--competitive lawn mowing! To me, it's super fun. Same thing with Rugby 6, which really isn't so much rugby, but it could be MORE like it. I find it to be filled with interesting choices, mainly revolving around playing the percentages. Should I go for the 12-point try to make up a deficit, or stay patient. Is one "double" enough, or should I try for another?
• We're working with Mike Fitzgerald on a new music-themed game, we're using "Battle of the Bands" and "Before the Tour" as a working title, it changes from week to week, haha! Many PLAAY gamers saw an earlier version of this game at last year's convention, we've made significant progress since then. We got the game in front of some hobby board game "influencers" at Dice Tower, with some great, positive feedback. We'll include this game as one of our options for the upcoming "Game Lab VII" video stream.
• My one regret of Dice Tower West was not taking full advantage of the Flea Market. I say this as a buyer, not a vendor. For ten bucks you could have a table for two hours (10a to noon on Saturday) to unload your unplayed or excess game stash. MANY people took advantage of this. Steve Carey texted me that I should come down, and I did--but was immediately overwhelmed by the throng of people and the overload of games piled high on the tables. It was only later that I learned that there were a number of sports game titles among the masses. Most of them were relatively obscure (although there was a purportedly unopened 1978 copy of Statis-Pro Basketball for $50), but they would have been PERFECT for future installments of our "sports game antiquities" YouTube series! DOH! I only learned about this from Jason Aldrich--I asked him how he found these gems, he said "Simple! I just went to every table and asked, 'do you have any sports games?'" Brilliant. I will do that NEXT year!...